


And it all falls down

by AwashSquid



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Very slight gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-24
Updated: 2017-06-24
Packaged: 2018-11-18 06:10:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11285304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AwashSquid/pseuds/AwashSquid
Summary: She heard the explosion before she felt it, a massive booming noise that shook the very ground on which she stood.My take on the Swiss Base explosion and its aftermath.





	And it all falls down

She heard the explosion before she felt it, a massive booming noise that shook the very ground on which she stood. The coffee cup on her desk fell over, blanketing her paperwork with its remnants, and she instinctively righted it as another explosion sounded. Her first thought was that they were being bombed by Talon, or some other agency whose ire Overwatch had drawn. She looked out the window and saw the Command building begin to crumble inwards on itself, fire spreading out from the center.

The Valkyrie suit was on in record time, and Angela ran towards the falling structure against the tide of people who were trying to escape the attack. Her eyes swept the sky for any enemy planes, but there were none to be found among the clear blue horizon. They had prepared for something like this, of course, but all the preparation in the world didn’t seem to matter in that moment, when she heard the screams of people fleeing, people trapped, people dying. She heard the screams, and she knew that she could not help them all.

Several people attempted to jump out of windows, but before they even hit the ground Angela knew that the drop was too far for survival. She ignored the sickening crunch of a man falling to her left and pressed forward, running to the bottom of the building itself.

“Mercy here. If you are alive, respond with your location.” Her voice was drowned out by sirens, by cries of anguish, and by the roaring of the fire that she knew was at the center of the building. She didn’t dare go too far inside for fear that the structure would collapse upon her, but she explored the periphery, looking for anyone who had made it this close to escape. She found a few bodies that had already succumbed to death, and she left them to be retrieved at a later date—she couldn’t waste time now on the dead, not when others may be alive and in need of her help.

The building groaned ominously, and she heard a familiar voice over her comm. “Mercy, it’s Winston. The structure is unstable. You and your team need to get away from it ASAP.”

“I understand,” she affirmed, and she turned towards the exit. Small chunks of debris had been falling on and around her for a little while now, but the pieces were growing larger by the moment, and she just barely dodged a slab of concrete the size of her head. There was a creaking noise from above her, and she looked up to see a steel support beam groaning under the weight of the building, bowing in the middle. 

Angela ran, but somehow she knew that she would not escape in time, some animal instinct within her screaming that she had pushed her luck too far. The moaning of the girder succumbed to a resounding crack, and the building rumbled as it began to collapse entirely. The door was only feet away as she raced towards it—she could feel the wind at her back created by the falling structure—and then a pair of hands firmly pushed her, and she landed outside of the building just as it fell in on itself. She looked from her safety on the ground as the room she was just in was filled with debris, and she shuddered to think of how close she had been to being buried underneath it.

_The hands,_ she remembered, glancing around wildly. _Who pushed me?_ She found her answer in a man lying unconscious at the base of the building. He had suffered severe facial lacerations and was covered in blood, a small puddle of red liquid slowly forming under his face. She scanned the body, noting multiple lacerations in his white t-shirt, but nothing that looked too deep. A sharp inhale left her as she saw that his legs were pinned below the knee by a huge slab of concrete. He was breathing, his heart rate steady, but he needed to be taken to the med bay. Angela looked around for help, but there was no one to even attempt to help her lift off the crushing material. “Mercy here, I have a man down at entrance point 4 to the building. His lower legs are pinned, but he is stable. Requesting backup for extraction.”

“Copy that, Mercy. A team will be with you in five minutes.”

Normally, five minutes would be doable with this sort of injury, but the threat of the still-falling rubble made Mercy unwilling to stay in such a vulnerable position for that length of time. She had to move him away from the structure, and she had to do it now.

Angela took a deep breath and pulled the surgical saw from her belt, wielding it in her right hand and holding her staff in her left—the staff would help to cauterize the wound as she worked so that he wouldn’t bleed out while she performed the transtibial amputation to his ruined legs, and once he was free she should be able to drag him far enough away. She hoped.

The operation was a lot more rushed than It should have been, but Angela supposed that was inherent in the nature of battlefield medicine—never enough supplies, never enough time to work. He had woken up soon after the first incision, disoriented but conscious, and she had to pretend not to hear him screaming with every step she took towards freeing him from the building.

She didn’t always think of herself as a miracle worker, but examining her handiwork she thought that the procedure had gone remarkably well. Just as she finished, a few soldiers ran her way with a stretcher. They hoisted the man onto it even as he groaned and took him away towards the medical bay, Angela following closely behind.

Every bed in the medical bay was full, and cots had been drug in from storage and crew quarters to accommodate even more people. Nurses and doctors skillfully wove in and out of the maze of beds and bodies, rushing from one patient to another at top speed. Angela noted several beds with blue clipboards hanging from them—Overwatch medical code for, “this patient won’t make it, don’t spend time trying.” She glanced at these people briefly, with a moment of pity for each soul who would not survive this tragedy, until she recognized one in particular.

“Gabriel,” came the whisper, unbidden from her mouth, and she crossed to the corner cot where he lay, his skin grey-tinged and pale. His eyes stared beyond her, beyond the ceiling, to something that only those who are dying can see, and she heard a voice whispering the word “no” several times before realizing that it was her own. She grabbed a wrist—already cooler than it should have been—and checked for a pulse, and she found the weak beat of a man dying.

His breathing had become shallow and raspy, and Angela knew that there were others who needed her care, others who she was neglecting, but _mein Gott,_ they would have to wait a few more moments. It was selfish and unprofessional and against her oaths a doctor, but she couldn’t bear to let her friend die alone.

A slight glimmer of sunlight catching glass refracted on the wall, and Angela glanced at its source: her discarded staff propped up against the bed, all but forgotten as she held Gabriel’s hands. Maybe, she thought, he doesn’t have to die at all.

“Parker,” she called out, signaling the nurse nearest her. “Prep him for emergency surgery.”

He hesitated, eyes shifting to the blue clipboard meaningfully. “Doctor—” he began, but Angela cut him off with a wave of her hand.

“Do it immediately, Parker, understand? I will get scrubbed up and meet you there.” She grabbed her staff and walked swiftly towards the OR. The technology was untested, true, but she had to try, at least. _And if it doesn’t work,_ she thought, _he was going to die anyway._

\--

Jack woke up with a gasp, jolting awake abruptly. _The explosion—Gabriel—_ his mind was racing, and it took several seconds for him to calm down enough to take a deep breath. He looked around frantically, trying to get his bearings, and panic began to creep up on him again when he realized that his previously perfect vision was now blurry and indistinct. “Fuck,” he whispered, blinking a few times in an attempt to clear his sights, with no luck. He could still make out shapes of beds, of people, of a few nurses bustling around the more critical patients. There were privacy dividers between him and the patients next to him, and he heard the poor soul on his right groaning softly. The lights were dimmed slightly to give some inclination that it was nighttime, but other than that, he had no way of knowing exactly how long he had been out.

His right hand instinctively went to run through his hair, a habit of his that he had never gotten rid of, and he felt dried blood caked into his scalp, along with small pieces of rock. He gingerly touched his face and found stitches sewing up what felt like two long gashes. There was old blood caking the portions of his face that weren’t sewn together; he could feel it crumbling as he tested his range of facial movement, and he scraped a little off with a fingernail. Idly, he wondered if the blood was even his, or if it was—

_Gabriel._ Had he made it out? Was he alive? Jack knew that he was injured, but he had to get up and find out. He pulled back the sheet and prepared to hop out of the cot. But when the thin cotton was removed, he gasped at the realization that he no longer had legs below the knee. 

“Fuck,” he hissed between his teeth, willing limbs to move—limbs that were no longer attached to him, limbs that weren’t there. He knew that legs could be rebuilt (shit, Shimada had been more robotic than human, after all), but there was still some primal horror at looking down, expecting to see his calves, his feet, and instead just seeing white cotton, flecks of dried blood spotting it where his legs now ended.

He heard footsteps approaching from the hallway to his left, probably to check on patient progress. When he recognized the light voice, accented thickly but speaking perfect English, he yanked the sheet back over himself, laying down quickly and closing his eyes. He couldn’t deal with Angela just yet. He was being a coward; he knew that, and the realization burned deep in his chest as he feigned sleep and listened.

“The only good news,” Angela intoned quietly to whoever her companion was, “is that I think I can make some improvements so that it will be successful in the future.” Her voice was wavering, and Jack knew her well enough to hear the false optimism in her tone. It sounded as though she had been crying.

“It wasn’t your fault, love.” Lena’s voice was immediately recognizable. “You did all you could for ‘im. That’s all Gabriel could have asked for.”

The words knocked the air from Jack’s lungs, and he felt a deep pain in his chest that didn’t stem from the explosion. He didn’t even register what the women said next—something about the number of dead, the number of injured, but that all seemed somewhat insignificant now. _You did this,_ he thought, hearing Gabe’s last words to him in his mind. _You didn’t listen, and now it’s too late._ Gabriel was dead, and it was his fault. Dozens more were dead—his fault. About a hundred injured—his fault. He felt the weight of the tragedy settle onto his shoulders, and he wanted to scream in despair. He couldn’t go back to being Strike Commander, not after this. Overwatch needed someone better in charge, someone who wasn’t naïve enough to ignore the signs of corruption, signs that Gabriel had tried to tell him about, but he wouldn’t fucking _listen—_

Angela and Lena’s voices faded as they walked away, and Jack’s face crumpled in pain, his stitches pulling with the action. He could feel some fresh blood leaking from them, along with a slight sting that he realized was coming from a few tears that were trailing down his cheek, the salt irritating his wounds. He pressed his palms firmly against his eyes, hard enough that he saw colors swirl behind his eyelids.

A thought came to him then. Why didn’t Angela stop by to see if he was conscious? He sat up abruptly and stretched to grab the clipboard attached to the bottom of his bed. Most of the paperwork was just listing his injuries, medications given, procedures done—it looked like Angela had done the amputation in the field, he noticed, and he flinched at a sudden memory of screaming with a mouthful of ash and earth as he felt the saw work across his leg bone. Other than that, his face had been sewn up and he had been given antibiotics, but nothing else was done, seeing as his condition was listed as “STABLE” in large, blocky lettering. No name, no blood type, since they hadn’t done transfusions, no fingerprints… There had been too much chaos to take note of one patient, one who didn’t need further attention. One whose face was caked in blood and dirt, who wasn’t wearing his Strike Commander jacket, having tossed it off when the bottom caught fire as he ran.

He ripped the paper from its clipboard and stuffed it into one of his pockets. If he was going to do this, he had to do it right: no traces left behind. Jack shimmied awkwardly to the end of the bed, unused to his missing appendages, and glanced quickly right and left down the rows of beds and cots. The few nurses present all seemed to be busy tending to patients, and even though his vision was cloudy, he could tell that no one had turned to look in his direction. 

The doorway was just a few feet to his left, past one other patient’s bed. He wasn’t sure how he was going to get out of the base just yet. _Sometimes, you just have to improvise a little, Jackie,_ rang a familiar voice in his head, teasing him over his carefully concocted planning strategies and eliciting a sharp pang of grief in his chest.

He shook his head to clear it. He could deal with his emotional pain later. Right now, he had to get the fuck away, and he had to do it fast. Lowering himself to the floor was challenging, but he managed without making too much noise. He flipped onto his stomach and started to army-crawl underneath the divider to his left. _At least all those drills were good for something¸_ he thought wryly as he popped out of the fabric on its other side. 

The right hand of the man lying on the bed was dangling off the side, unnaturally still. Jack applied a feather-light touch to the inside of the wrist and found that it was cold. He propped himself up to look into the bed. The face of the dead man wasn’t even one that he recognized; they had been bringing in a lot of new recruits recently from all over the world, and with the organization crumbling around him, he hadn’t been able to learn all of their names. This one couldn’t have been older than his twenties. Another death that he had caused by letting Overwatch fall.

Jack saw the prosthetic legs attached to the man and reached for them without thinking. His hand retracted for a fraction of a second, disturbed that he was about to steal limbs from a dead man, before reaching out and touching the metal appendage. He couldn’t afford to play by the rules any more.

He didn’t have the medical equipment, knowledge, or precision to hook up the nerve endings properly, so he couldn’t feel the prosthetics or control them with a thought like he would have been able to do with his real legs. But they attached, and they would let him walk, and that would be enough to get him away from Overwatch, which was what mattered most right now. 

He walked away from the base without sparing a backward glance. There was no point in turning around; this wasn’t something he could fix. He had heard whispers of treason, seen signs of discord, and had willfully ignored them all. He was never meant to be a leader. He should have rejected the position and kept being a soldier. And now, that’s all he would be for the rest of his life.

\--

The heart monitor, still hooked up to the corpse of Gabriel Reyes, had been silent for hours. The scene had been preserved so that Angela could study the effects of her work more thoroughly, and the assisting doctors had all left to tend to other patients. No one was around to hear the single, solitary beep of a heart quivering within a broken rib cage.  
Then another beep, and the tips of his fingers dissolved into smoke as they twitched. The beeps started to come more, faster and faster, as more smoke materialized and the body on the table began to convulse, going from gentle tics to violent spasms in the matter of a minute. The beeping reached a frantic pace, faster than a human heart was ever meant to beat, faster than the machine could possibly register—

And then stopped, heart rate again registering as 0 bpm. Gabriel Reyes’s eyes snapped open and he screamed.


End file.
